The evolution of massive black holes and their spins in their galactic hosts

By E. Barausse. 2012

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Future space-based gravitational-wave detectors, such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA/SGO) or a similar European mission (eLISA/NGO), will measure the masses and spins of massive black holes up to very high redshift, and in principle discriminate among different models for their evolution. Because the masses and spins change as a result of both accretion from the interstellar medium and the black hole mergers that are expected to naturally occur in the hierarchical formation of galaxies, their evolution is inextricably entangled with that of their galactic hosts. On the one hand, the amount of gas present in galactic nuclei regulates the changes in the black hole masses and spins through accretion, and affects the mutual orientation of the spins before mergers by exerting gravitomagnetic torques on them. On the other hand, massive black holes play a central role in galaxy formation because of the feedback exerted by active galactic nuclei on the growth of structures. In this paper, we study the mass and spin evolution of massive black holes within a semi-analytical galaxy-formation model that follows the evolution of dark-matter haloes along merger trees, as well as that of the baryonic components (hot gas, stellar and gaseous bulges, and stellar and gaseous galactic discs). This allows us to study the mass and spin evolution in a self-consistent way, by taking into account the effect of the gas present in galactic nuclei both during the accretion phases and during mergers. Also, we present predictions, as a function of redshift, for the fraction of gas-rich black hole mergers – in which the spins prior to the merger are aligned due to the gravitomagnetic torques exerted by the circumbinary disc – as opposed to gas-poor mergers, in which the orientation of the spins before the merger is roughly isotropic. These predictions may be tested by LISA or similar spaced-based gravitational-wave detectors such as eLISA/NGO or SGO.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/58df936a467022dfc1f766481750cddb44a2d3d8

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Citations in the corpus

Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. III: probing the expansion of the universe using gravitational wave standard sirens (2016, methodology): “3 Catalogues of BH binaries Our models for the population of MBHB are the same as those of Paper I, which are in turn based on the semi-analytical galaxy formation model of [25] (with later incremental improvements described in [26–28]).”
THE FINAL SPIN FROM BINARY BLACK HOLES IN QUASI-CIRCULAR ORBITS (2016, methodology): “…used both in the production of semi-analytical waveforms (e.g., in sEOB and phenomenological waveforms) and in cosmological studies of massive BH evolution (see, e.g., Berti & Volonteri 2008; Fanidakis et al. 2011; Barausse 2012; Volonteri et al. 2013; Dubois et al. 2014; Sesana et al. 2014).”
Testing modified gravity at cosmological distances with LISA standard sirens (2019, methodology): “To describe the cosmological evolution of massive black holes, and specifically MBHBs, we use the semi-analytic galaxy formation model of [170] (with later incremental improvements described in [171, 172]).”
MERGING BLACK HOLE BINARIES IN GALACTIC NUCLEI: IMPLICATIONS FOR ADVANCED-LIGO DETECTIONS (2016, methodology): “These galaxy formation models are described in Barausse (2012), Antonini et al. (2015a) and Antonini et al. (2015b).”
Improved reconstruction of a stochastic gravitational wave background with LISA (2020, background): “Depending on the astrophysical formation scenarios [8–12], LISA is going to detect few hundreds of massive (∼ 104–107M ) black hole binary mergers with Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) up to thousand.”